And he still has a job

Media Matters [for America] released clips Sunday night, as Vox detailed, where [Fox News host Tucker] Carlson makes misogynistic and offensive comments — including defending child sexual abuse, demeaning sex workers and women, and making suggestive comments about underage girls [during appearances he made on Bubba the Love Sponge’s radio show during the aughts].

  Vox

No wonder Trump likes him so much.

One minute after Tucker Carlson’s Monday evening show began, Media Matters [...] resurfaced audio clips of [him] echoing white nationalist themes and insulting Muslims.

[...]

“Iraq is a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys,” Carlson said in one clip from October 7, 2008.

[...]

[L]iberal groups, including Media Matters and Sleeping Giants, [have waged a pressure campaign] aimed at forcing Fox News to cut ties with Carlson. They’ve pushed national advertisers to drop support for his show, which frequently airs nationalist themes and demeans immigrants.

In the days before Trump became president, the pressure might have worked. Now, we just accept racism and homophobia as a matter of opinion, not a matter of social and political taboo, much less inherently dangerous.

The resurfaced audio clips published by Media Matters on Monday night focused on incendiary comments Carlson made about race and ethnicity.

“I just have zero sympathy for them or their culture,” Carlson said of Iraqis in 2006. “A culture where people just don’t use toilet paper or forks ... they can just shut the fuck up and obey, is my view.”

In other clips, Carlson questioned whether Barack Obama is really black, mused about a presidential candidate running on a platform of protecting the country from “Muslim lunatics,” and used a homophobic slur.

Most of the clips in question predate Carlson’s time at Fox News. He joined Fox in May 2009 after a stint at MSNBC from 2005 to 2008. But the nature of his comments echoes anti-immigration and white nationalist themes he’s known for promoting on his Fox News show.

In response to the first tranche of resurfaced audio clips, Fox News’s public relations arm released a statement from Carlson on Sunday night in which he downplayed his defense of child sexual abuse as “something naughty” that he said “on a radio show more than a decade ago.”

"Naughty"?

(Ironically, Carlson regularly attacks Democrats for things they said well over a decade ago, including during his broadcast last Friday night.)

Tucker Carlson fans don't understand irony.

Fox News executives didn’t weigh in on Carlson’s comments on Bubba the Love Sponge’s show, but instead opted to let his statement speak for itself. That approach differed from the one the network took in response to Islamophobic comments made by host Jeanine Pirro about Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) during her show last Saturday evening. Unnamed Fox News higher-ups released a statement on Sunday publicly rebuking Pirro’s comments, saying they “do not reflect those of the network and we have addressed the matter with her directly.”

That's because Jeanine doesn't have a popular show.

The Washington Post, citing an unnamed “Fox News insider,” reported on Monday that the network is trying to draw a distinction between the Carlson and Pirro situations, since the Pirro controversy “ involved something said on Fox itself,” whereas Carlson’s comments “were made when he worked for MSNBC more than a decade ago, not in his capacity as a Fox personality.”

Or because Jeanine doesn't have a popular show.

Carlson was defiant during his Monday evening show, the first since the clips surfaced. During his monologue, he portrayed himself as a victim of the “great American outrage machine.”

From what I've read and heard, Tucker Carlson's show leads the “great American outrage machine.”

“For now, just two points to leave you with. First, Fox News is behind us, as they have been since the very first day."

Us?

“Second, we’ve always apologized when we’re wrong, and will continue to do that. That’s what decent people do. They apologize. But we will never bow to the mob. Ever. No matter what.”

So "we" weren't wrong. No apology necessary.

In fact, he went on to use a white nationalist dog whistle during his Monday evening show.

Vox lets us down here by not repeating it.

On Tuesday morning, a Fox News spokesperson confirmed to Vox that the network is still standing behind Carlson.

Last December, Carlson — who took over Bill O’Reilly’s primetime time slot after O’Reilly was forced out amid a sexual harassment scandal in May 2017 — was widely denounced after he said during his Fox News that immigrants make America “poorer and dirtier and more divided.”

Carlson’s comments resulted in 14 companies pulling their advertising. AstraZeneca followed suit on Monday, on the heels of Media Matters publishing the first set of clips from Bubba the Love Sponge’s show.

Carlson’s show on Monday evening was especially bereft of advertising. Variety reported that it “featured just four ad breaks and very few big national commercials, relying instead on direct-response ads and sundry promos for other Fox News programs and properties distributed by its parent company, 21st Century Fox.”

[...]

[R]atings remain strong. On Monday, the Wrap reported that so far in 2019, Carlson’s show is “averaging 2.9 million total viewers per episode, which is 41 percent more than Chris Hayes on MSNBC and a whopping 122 percent more than CNN’s Anderson Cooper.”

[...]

Media Matters researchers indicate that more clips of him saying offensive things on Bubba the Love Sponge’s show are on the way.

He must have called in on a daily basis.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.